incel: How-to Kill Handbook

Thank you to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for the arc of Incel How to kill handbook.

After killing and murdering a man with a very good reason, A lawyer from New York City end up going off the radar and going away and begins life over on an island.

Under a new identity, Calvin Loch ‘fixes broken things’ for Chad and Stacy and nobody realizing the extent to which he end up going . he end up travelling the world as the authorities play catch-up with him. This is a serial killer’s diary, This is a chilling account exposing how in fact an intelligent person gets away with this. The verdict: crimes don’t warrant punishment if done by a balanced ‘bad man’ who believes that he’s doing good in many ways.

4 stars

incel: How-to Kill Handbook delves in to a deliciously sleazy world, that we all know exists but often turn a blind eye and refuse to acknowledge. It's also looks at own morality and what we consider to be right and wrong.

A sometimes uncomfortable but captivating and illuminating read.

Absolutely loved this book!! Very unique- like nothing I have ever read before. I would highly recommend it to avid readers such as myself.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3437651208

5 STARS. I admit, I did a certain amount of groaning and eye-rolling when first approached by noir small press Audax Books about reviewing their latest title, the provocatively titled <i>incel: How-to-Kill Handbook</i>, because historically speaking, books I've received of this type under these circumstances have tended to be so terrible as to be almost unreadable. So it comes as a huge relief to be able to convey that this actually turned out to be one of the most surprisingly great novels I've read in the last year, with a smart wit and a high quality to the prose that you usually don't find with books of this type.

The secret here is that this is not actually a book about incels at all; although marketed by the publisher as the "true thoughts" (if not true story) of self-defined "<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43892189">Supreme Gentleman</a>" Calvin Loch (but more on this in a moment), which he supposedly first shared as a nonfiction memoir online until "public condemnation forced him underground," in actuality this is a murder mystery told from the viewpoint of our violent unreliable narrator, in the style of Jim Thompson's classic <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>, with only lip service paid to the incel movement through a random scattering of the specialized vocabulary (Chads, betas, blackpills, etc) that this movement uses to both justify and encourage each other's behavior.

Don't get me wrong, this is the precise reason the book is so good; for without the need to stick to any real-life events or a hardcore incel mindset, Loch instead provides us a nearly perfect three-act genre plot, smoothly guiding us through an evermore insane journey that starts at the quiet suburban law firm where he initially works, and ends with him being an international fugitive hiding out on a Caribbean island, with several detours along the way to interact with a thinly disguised Jeffrey Epstein. Plus, in the same spirit as Mary Harron's brilliant film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' <i>American Psycho</i>, Loch deliberately adds several scenes here that are just so over-the-top hilariously absurdist, we're left wondering whether he actually means for this to be a drama at all, but rather an extremely clever black comedy designed expressly to take the piss out of the incel movement, not champion it.

Let's be clear -- I don't buy for even a second that "Calvin Loch" is actually the person he's portraying himself as here. For one glaring thing, Loch-the-author is rather hard on Loch-the-character; at various points he describes himself as openly racist on top of his incel-like misogyny, with a huge amount of self-hatred and a growing belief that maybe suicide would be the best thing he could do for the world, a history of mental illness that requires medication that he sometimes skips, and an insistence that we shouldn't actually trust a word he's saying, because he might just be insane and making everything up. (Also, despite the author supposedly being American, his dialogue is full of British mannerisms -- "I've" instead of "I have," "I'm on about" instead "I'm talking about," "cop on" instead of "grow up," and more.) And also to make it insultingly obvious, since we now live in an age where we're all forced to be this insultingly obvious, let me clearly state that I in no way agree with or endorse the incel mindset, nor do I recommend the slaughtering of other human beings. But you don't have to be an incel to enjoy <i>incel: How-to-Kill Handbook</i>, just like you don't have to be a corrupt Texas sheriff serial killer to enjoy <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>. This should instead be looked at as a deliciously dark pulp noir, a great new addition to the genre that marks Audax as a growing power in this wing of the publishing world. (Or, at least we'll see -- I have another one of their books, the 9/11 paramedic serial-killer novel <i>American Slaughterhouse</i>, in the queue for review in another couple of weeks.) It comes strongly recommended to those who can stomach it, a delightfully horrible tale for those who are tired of our All Earnest Times.